The brain has largely been ignored in body studies, and for a long time the neurosciences generally ignored the rest of the body, and embodiment. But the spread of neuroscience into general knowledge about the body and self places the once inaccessible brain at the forefront of consciousness. I am interested in what happens to our ideas and experiences of our bodies as we become deeply invested in the brain and its modification and improvement. Does new knowledge about the brain open new paths for embodiment? What are the shifts in the ways bodies are lived that are made possible by the entrance of neuroscience into everyday life and popular culture?
I am interested in how in some sense, bodies become embrained; body problems are linked to the brain and the brain becomes a focus of solutions. We are used to thinking not only of the mind as separate from the body, but to the extent that we thought about it at all, we also treated the brain as separate from the rest of the body. Now that we are asked to be brain-aware, we are learning to more readily link our outer and lower bodies to what is happening inside the skull. Weight loss may now be a matter of targeting the prefrontal cortex, and the ovaries are now linked up with the hypothalamus. Sometimes, the brain trumps other body parts in our bodily awareness, rendering us neurocentric.
Further, as minds become materialized – that is, as mental processes are understood as processes of neuronal firing and wiring – psychic matters join up with body matters. This is already familiar to us; we know that anti-depressants, stimulants and other drugs modulate our brain chemistry. But neuroscience tells us that all thought is brain modulation and that all learning changes the brain. When we start to think this way in everyday life, even a non-medical, low-tech practice like meditation becomes a practice of brain modification, and biofeedback becomes, with the help of electroencephalography, neurofeedback. The materialization of mind affects what we think the body is and can do.
In addition, brains become embodied in the sense that brains are welcomed into the sphere of our bodily awareness, bodily practices, projects and techniques. The brain becomes the focus of the kinds of practices we once targeted only at the body. Brains go to the gym, they are subject to enhancement, and are the target of professional help and do-it-yourself remedies.
It might be that the classical dualism given to us by Descartes is seriously challenged in these processes. Dualism divides the body from mind, thinking the former as the organic stuff of nature and the later as that which transcends biology. Neuroscience assumes not a dualistic but a monistic, materialist view of the person, seeing no difference between mind and the organic stuff of the body that allows thinking and feeling to happen.
Materialism has the potential to shake up many of our assumptions about how we think, learn, behave, work, feel, and act. When we see the neural mechanisms that are these processes happening at the brain level, we are inspired to rethink their meanings. At the same time, it might be that Cartesian dualism is not in any danger of disappearing. Dualism still dominates non-scientific, lay understandings of ourselves. It may also be retained in a lot of neuroscientific discourse; for example, we see neoliberal assumptions that we can control our bodies (and are thus in some sense not our bodies) in brain-related health advice.
The brain might become a body part under the control of a powerful self, or become seen as the locus of the body’s power to change itself. How are the conceptual distances between body, mind and self in everyday life challenged as neuroscience is popularized? How do social norms and cultural expectations influence the ways neuroscience is consumed? In what ways is the brain becoming the site of bodily self-care?
Bodies with brains, and brains with bodies, are the subjects of my current research and writing.
